Damascus

In 1337 Damascus was a Mamluk provincial capital, and the Black Death of 1348–49 killed as much as half of its people. Worse came with Timur in 1400. The Mamluk sultan sent a deputation from Cairo, the historian Ibn Khaldun among them, to treat with him, but once they had gone Timur sacked the city in March 1401, burning the Great Mosque and carrying its artisans off to Samarkand. The heads of the slain were piled outside the northeast corner of the walls, at a spot long remembered as the Tower of Heads.

In October 1516 the Friday sermon in the Great Mosque was read in the name of the Ottoman Selim I. Aleppo was the larger and richer city for most of the Ottoman centuries, but the sultans gave Damascus more attention than its size warranted, because one of the two great Hajj caravans to Mecca set out from here; in 1559 a mosque and hostel for its pilgrims, designed by Sinan, was completed on their road. Ottoman rule went unbroken until 1832, when Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt occupied the city.